Thorben Wieditz

Aug 4, 2024 | theglobeandmail.com | Thorben Wieditz

Open this photo in gallery:98 Lillian St. in Toronto. To accurately assess the impact of commercial short-term rentals, it’s essential to focus on their proportion of available housing units rather than the total housing stock.Andre KutyanPlease log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free AccountThorben Wieditz is executive director of Fairbnb Canada Network.

May 16, 2024 | spacing.ca | Mahtot Gebresselassie |Tricia Wood |Glenn Miller |Thorben Wieditz

In a recent ranking index, Toronto is listed as the third worst congested city in the world (after London and Dublin). The metric used by the company (Tomtom) is how long it takes to drive 10 kilometers. Toronto ranks high for terrible congestion by other indices with other metrics, too. A recent article by the Star offered technology as the solution to the wicked problem of traffic congestion (again).

Apr 2, 2024 | monitormag.ca | Thorben Wieditz |Kristin Mead |Katherine Scott |David Macdonald

#Blocksidewalk was a grassroots campaign that formed in 2019 after a Toronto Star article reported that Google-subsidiary Sidewalk Labs was after hundreds of acres of publicly owned land along Toronto’s eastern waterfront. The company's goal? To build a “smart city”—a sensor-laden test bed to extract behavioural data from Torontonians.

Jan 28, 2024 | thestar.com | Thorben Wieditz

We live in interesting times. We use residential units as hotel suites on Airbnb; we use hotels as homeless shelters; and we discuss office-to-residential conversion as a solution to our housing crisis — often at the same time in the same place. Already a Subscriber? Sign in You are logged in  Switch accounts All we seem to be doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, not to meet existing social needs but to find new ways to make a profit.

Nov 14, 2023 | spacing.ca | Thorben Wieditz |Dylan Reid |John Lorinc |Albert Koehl

In October, City Council temporarily paused issuing ride-hailing licenses for Lyft and Uber at 52,000, or ten times the pre-Uber average of taxi licenses. This pause has been supported by existing drivers but opposed by Uber and Lyft. In the days following this decision, we witnessed a resurfacing of Uber’s founding narrative, and while this narrative held sway ten years ago, it no longer does — and here is why. When Uber entered Toronto in 2014, it did so on a wave of untested promises.